And the Russian judge only gave me a 4.5 ....

I'm not a big fan of the treadmill.

As an engineer, I think it's ingenious - if you can't move relative to the ground due to space or weather etc, then have the ground move relative to you. As a doctor, I love it becuase it can literally be a lifesaver - it's recognized as the most effective piece of exercise equipment to get your heart rate up to "training levels". It's also pivotal in cardiopumonary stress testing, etc.

As a runner, who's more of a plodder, I hate it.

It feels artificial; it's noisy; it's boring. And as a few days ago, it almost killed me.

Well, not really, but let's just say it was a wild ride.

When I run on the treadmill in the way-too-early morning at the Y, I sometimes feel like the 6 million dollar man. I wear my insulin pump on the waistband on one of my hips that has small tubing that snakes under my clothes to the infusion port on the other upper buttock. On the same buttock that the pump resides I have a continuous glucose sensor tegaderm-ed to me that beams blood sugar readings to my pump every 5 minutes. Under my shirt and against my skin, a Polar heart rate monitor fits snugly around my body just under the chest. I wear the heart monitor watch on the left wrist (I hate wearing watches). I put my iPod on the treadmill stand itself and the ear phone cords are plugged snuggly in my ears. I usually wear a baseball hat because I have the worst "bed-head" imagninable every morning. And I occasionally attach the little safety thing from the treadmill to my shorts, in case I fall off - that is called foresahdowing.

About two weeks ago I was trudging along. Thump, thump, thump. Green Day was blasting away through my headphones and the talking heads from Fox news on the tv on the wall were blathering about something - however, whoever was typing the closed captioning obviously didn't have English as their first language.

I started to feel a little lightheaded which sometimes can mean that my blood sugar is dropping. I was wearing my sensor that morning, so instead of stopping the tradmill or straddling the belt, I decided to see what the pump meter display said while I still running.

Instead of unclipping it from my gym shorts waistband, I thought it'd be easy just to twist to the right and glance at it in mid-stride.

This caused me to veer a little to the left but I caught myself and quickly corrected. However, by turning my head to the right, it caused my iPod to pull a little bit off the treadmill stand and it was now dangling close to the edge.

In what was a bad decision, I whipped my head around to try to catch my iPod as it stared to fall and I tripped over my own feet.

Never do that on a treadmill.

While it's going at 6 mph.

I saw the iPod hit the treadmill deck and it was zipped out of sight. I was heading face first into the deck myself but was able to put out my hands at the last instant.

As soon as my hands hit the moving treadmill, they whipped out of the way and I was now forward rolling on to my back (instinctively tucking my head, thank god). I landed on my back, upside down on the treadmill and was instantaneously shot off the back of treadmill onto the floor of the gym where upon landing, I think I yelped like a little girl as the momentum flipped my over onto my stomach where I came to rest, facedown.

I quickly got up and mentally checked for blood and broken bones and despite a little rugburn on my back, I was fine.

I was in the back row of the treadmills because I am very antisocial at that time of the morning - so there is nothing behind me, thank god once again. There had to be 30 other people in the gym at that time, but no one saw it. Or maybe no one admitted it because this is Minnesota after all.

I started to laugh as I picked up my stuff off the floor. The "safety stop" cord was still attached to the machine and was dangling straight down - it had failed miserably in what it was supposed to do, instead of flinging me across the room. I was now fully awake, that's for sure. I got back up on the treadmill and slowed it down to an easy walk. I couldn't help just chuckling and shaking my head - like most people do when they have near death experiences.

After a minute I realized I never got a chance to see what my blood sugar was. I almost instinctively did it again - contorting my body instead of stopping and looking at the screen like a normal person, but I stopped myself at the last minute - I straddled the belt, unclipped my pump and was happy to see that my blood sugar was in the normal range.

I think I'll go back to the rowing machine next week.